European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Swire and William Cash

Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Monday 6th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir William Cash]

I have enormous sympathy with that. In point of fact, the Secretary of State for Brexit gave evidence in the House of Lords, where, as I understand it, he made it abundantly clear that any document that would be made available to the European Parliament and its committees would, indeed, be made available to this House. To that extent, I agree with the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford), but I believe such a measure to be unnecessary because an undertaking has already been given by the Secretary of State.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

New clause 3(c) would

“make arrangements for Parliamentary scrutiny of confidential documents.”

Given my hon. Friend’s wide experience, for how long does he think the contents of those documents would remain confidential if they were made available for wide parliamentary scrutiny?

[Sir William Cash]

Well, they certainly would not. That is really the purpose of the limité restriction. Although I have reservations about the restriction in certain cases, I can think of a number of instances in which it is absolutely vital that the documents remain confidential. If there were any breach of that confidentiality —there would have to be an undertaking by the Prime Minister that she would release it—it could gum up the works to such an extent on matters of intelligence, security and all sorts of things that we would actually end up not receiving any limité documents at all.

With great respect, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook), who led from the Opposition Front Bench, may or may not have been dealing with these matters for some time, and I will not criticise him for that—[Interruption.] No, this is a perfectly fair point. All I am saying is that, in drafting this, if we end up with something that does not work and we have to comply with new clause 3(a), (b) and (c) to make it work, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset said, we would end up in the courts—and there would be a judicial review, believe me. It naturally follows that the new clause is simply nonsense, so it cannot be brought into effect. That is all I need to say about it.